Confessions of a Music Box

--Bruce Bond

No larger than a bird coffin,

the kind that opens its one wing

onto a sky it cannot take to,

save as the thin and silver trickle

of a tune, a feather fanning

the ghost goodbye, as if to say, yes,

it’s true, how the ancients saw it,

that music is the sound numbers

make on the verge of extinction

or sleep, whatever comes first,

that it sends its arrows through

the ear’s window, clean through and yet

attached, brightening the glass.

That’s why a monk I read loved

music, not merely for the holy

signatures, the geometry

of tones that are its body, but how

that body dies again and again,

how it slips its box like steam, like gold.

Ask any star in the Greek

toy chest of stars, any sphere,

and it returns you to an image

of this, to the singing of a thing

you wind, or someone winds, the grind

of a song it never tires of.

A lullaby. How like a box

to hoard its measure of nothing

we speak of until, that is, the box

of dark inside breaks, confessing

the way an old grief confesses

or some nocturnal heating vent

pouring air between its teeth.

But then... if you call this news,

it is never news enough.

Only paired phrases like a doll

house on fire, like the small

murmur of a child at her bed,

talking to a god she has only

heard of, a father locked up in

the rhymes of parables, of hymns:

and if I die before I wake.

Either way she dies, she wakes.